Huge libraries have been compiled with questions for symptoms relating to diseases. Known expert systems for medical diagnosis can use these libraries to phrase questions and based on the questions calculate the likelihood of the diseases. To come to a reliable diagnosis the number of questions to be put is too high for practical use. Using only a limited number of questions in the known system makes the chance of overlooking a possible serious disease too high. This can cause liability issues. Therefore, the known systems evaluate all possible diseases fully, making the systems impractical and user unfriendly.
It is an object of the invention to provide a user friendly expert system, in particular a medical diagnosis system, that with a limited number of interactions with a user can confirm a hypothesis (e.g. make a diagnosis) without risking overlooking hypotheses that may not be taken by the system or can not be taken with the limited number of interactions.